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These banquets extended over France, attended by a coalition of hostile parties, the chiefs of which were Thiers, Odillon Barrot, De Tocqueville, Garnier-Pagès, Lamartine, and Ledru-Rollin, who pointed out the evils of the times. At last, in 1848, the opposition resolved on a great banquet in Paris, to defy the government. The radicals sounded the alarm in the newspapers.
Récamier was most remarkable; for with the new statesmen, Thiers, Guizot, Mignet, De Tocqueville, Sainte-Beuve, as well as the nobles and princes, she was on most cordial terms, and was received in any salon which she chose to visit. Her unbounded sympathy, tact, and common sense made her friendship and counsel much in demand by great men.
Rudin took the thin volume in his hand, turned over a few pages of it, and laying it down on the table, replied that he had not read that particular work of M. de Tocqueville, but that he had often reflected on the question treated by him. A conversation began to spring up.
For two hours the deputies remained in the open air; then they were transferred at dark to the third story of a wing of the barracks. They found themselves in two long halls, with low ceilings and dirty walls, used as the soldiers' dormitories. They had no furniture but some wooden benches. M. de Tocqueville was quite ill. The rooms were bitterly cold.
De Tocqueville remarked that "the prejudice which repels the negroes seems to increase in proportion as they are emancipated."
The tendency of civil service reform legislation, furthermore, has been to require a certain minimum of education, though it may be feared that the forecast of De Tocqueville remains justified; our national educational weakness is our failure to provide for a "serious higher instruction." The great question of taxation we may only mention here by way of exclusion.
However, European travelers, among them De Tocqueville, recognized that the survival of the New World experiment in government and the prosperity and strength of the people were due in large measure to the superiority of American women.
It is interesting and suggestive to recall how a later publicist viewed the ills that dwarf our little lives. 'If I were asked to class human miseries, said Tocqueville, 'I would do so in this order: first, Disease; second, Death; third, Doubt. At a later date, he altered the order, and deliberately declared doubt to be the most insupportable of all evils, worse than death itself.
But what M. de Tocqueville did not see, there are others who will see; who will say: "If religion be the pillar of political and social order, there is an order which is best supported by a religion which is adverse to free thought, free speech, free conscience, free communion between man and God.
The appalling magnitude of the deportations and imprisonments by the new Government seems to show that the hatred went deeper than Tocqueville supposed, and on the other hand it can hardly be said that the educated classes wholly repudiated what had been done when we remember that the French Funds at once rose from 91 to 102, that nearly all branches of French commerce made a similar spring, that some twenty generals were actively engaged in the conspiracy, and that the great body of the priests were delighted at its success.
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